Social Choice

Abstract

This article is a critical survey of the literature of social choice theory, first formalized by Kenneth Arrow in 1951. Social choice theory deals with the aggregation of some measure of individual welfare into a collective measure. It takes different forms according both to what is being aggregated (interests, judgements, and so on) and to the purpose of the aggregation. The methodology of social choice has greatly clarified a range of hitherto obscure problems.

Gaertner, W. and A. Heinecke. 1978. Cyclically mixed preferences: A necessary and sufficient condition for transitivity of the social preference relation. In Gottinger and Leinfellner (1978).Google Scholar

Schmeidler, D. and H. Sonnenschein. 1978. Two proofs of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem on the possibility of a strategyproof social choice function. In Gottinger and Leinfellner (1978).Google Scholar